Heh, I suppose. I guess I'm not enough of a Beatles fan to know that they hard-panned lead vocals at some point. That is to say, I only have more than a passing familiarity with a handful of their songs, and I never really "got" them (nor did I really want to).

It isn't like that on all the songs, but some of the tracks have the drums/bass in the center, vocals panned hard to one side, and most of the other instruments panned hard to the other side. Having the vocals in the center but drums and bass hard-panned ("Fixing A Hole" is like this) is pretty weird too, especially through headphones.

derFunkenstein wrote:

For a short time my car was "mono", because the both the front and rear right-side speakers died. It's weird listening to stereo music with one channel removed.

Yeah, the speaker in the driver-side door on our van is currently dead. There's a speaker on the left side of the dash too, but that one seems to be a tweeter so if you're driving you only get bass from behind and to the right of you.

It isn't like that on all the songs, but some of the tracks have the drums/bass in the center, vocals panned hard to one side, and most of the other instruments panned hard to the other side. Having the vocals in the center but drums and bass hard-panned ("Fixing A Hole" is like this) is pretty weird too, especially through headphones.

Outside of Help! and Rubber Soul, the stereo mixes were pure afterthoughts put out to keep snobby Americans buying the product. They were never the end goal of George Martin's recording process. Many stereo songs use different takes from the mono mixes and thus sound odd to seasoned mono listeners.

If you really want to hear the pan-potting, just fire up the stereo version of "Taxman" from Revolver.

The only albums mixed to stereo at creation are Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. Even Help! and Rubber Soul were mixed to mono originally and then remixed to stereo back in 1965.

The Latin Rite Agnus Dei set to Barber's Adagio For Strings. I was a fair-to-middlin' chorister back in HS (3 All-State, 2 All-New England, second bass), and the breath control needed in this piece is simply beyond belief. DerFunk knows this (well, once he listens), as expecting sopranos to hold a note that high for 30 seconds usually ends up like Long-Haired Hare.

The piece is but 69 measures long. The link above is 9:27 long. It had best be your closing piece as no one will be able to sing worth a crap for several hours after this lung-buster.

Outside of Help! and Rubber Soul, the stereo mixes were pure afterthoughts

Heh. My copy of Rubber Soul seems to have some pretty egregious pan-potting on it. Almost everything panned hard left/right on many tracks. Heck, I don't hear *anything* in the center on "Norwegian Wood". Nada.

Captain Ned wrote:

put out to keep snobby Americans buying the product.

As opposed to the modern-day equivalent, snobby purists shelling out again for mono reissues?

Captain Ned wrote:

If you really want to hear the pan-potting, just fire up the stereo version of "Taxman" from Revolver.

As opposed to the modern-day equivalent, snobby purists shelling out again for mono reissues?

A/K/A hearing them as originally intentioned?

Before I bought the mono set I had the US stereo versions of Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and the White Album. Haven't listened to any of those stereo versions once I got the mono box set. George Martin really did know what he was doing.

As opposed to the modern-day equivalent, snobby purists shelling out again for mono reissues?

A/K/A hearing them as originally intentioned?

I did put the wink emoji in there... I'm just giving you a hard time.

I really do grok where you're coming from, and if I was more of a fan of early Beatles I'd be shelling out the cash for that box set too. While they were an integral part of the soundtrack of my childhood, I've never felt a pressing need to meticulously replicate that listening experience. What I've got currently is generally good enough for me.

Dire Straits - Live: Alchemy (why I didn't have this already is beyond me; next week I'll find the copy I forgot I had). Had it on cassette back in college. Still have the deck, but SWMBO took it upon herself to ditch the tapes at least 20 years ago. Doubt that new rubber parts to replace the 30-YO dried-up bits of the tape path even exist anymore (Denon DR-M44HX). Private Investigations has always been my go-to on this album. Mark Knopfler is criminally underrated.

Grateful Dead - Their official release of the 5/8/77 ur-concert at Cornell. Based on the same tapes (Betty Boards) as all of the ROIO versions out there, but they seem to have fixed the dbX reference voltage issue so the bass doesn't sound like me after a pepperoni/anchovy calzone (Dolby used a fixed reference bias voltage, dbX a variable sliding one, and the Betty Boards are in dbX). HDCD-encoded, so dbPoweramp spits out a 24-bit WAV file. Thankfully, my listening chain can handle that.

Jethro Tull - Songs From The Wood 40th Remaster. Where I did not like Steven Wilson's work on Yes, I love it here (Ian was already a perfectionist). 3CD (original album + even more unreleased; then a 2-disc composite "In Concert 1977") and 2 DVD, including a concert vid, a 5.1 of the album, and some 24/96 of various bits. In reading the booklet, I find that the '70's-era keyboard "assistant" David Palmer is now Dee Palmer. Well, for a lead signer who made his bones wearing a giant codpiece, it fits. Ian & Martin, I beseech thee. Fix whatever happened.

My only problem is that I'm the first to use dbPoweramp to move copies of Dead/Tull to my portable music drive (for those who forget, they're WAVs), so it processes each song 3-4 times to assure internal consistency. I'll upload to AccurateRip as soon as I can so no one else has to deal with this.

I rip using K3B these days, and have the "paranoia mode" cranked all the way up. Rips take forever, but I only need to do them once.

I was not aware of AccurateRip... looks like a really good idea. If there isn't a decent Linux-compatible AccurateRip tool it gives me another reason to do that Windows gaming build I've been talking about doing since last winter. (I used EAC back in the day, and it looks like it has AccurateRip support now.)

As an aside for those who've never tried to rip a large CD collection: It's amazing how bad most PC optical drives are at returning accurate data for audio CD rips. Historically, "bit-accurate" rippers like EAC (Windows) and the "paranoia" modes (Linux) have used a combination of heuristics, multiple re-reads, and other techniques in an attempt to recover all of the data accurately. It sounds like AccurateRip has created a database (of hashes? haven't looked into the details...) to assist CD ripping tools in detecting when they've got an accurate rip.

Quirky pop-rock. IMO not as consistent or interesting as her album that preceded it (Martinis and Bikinis).

This is just too weird to absorb properly at work. I'll have to sit down and listen to it, although my initial impression is "experimental sounding, yet hopelessly pretentious". Initial impressions are often wrong, though!

But not always. "Weird" and "pretentious" aren't too far off the mark IMO, though on the "experimental" scale it's pretty tame. If you really want experimental I'll recommend you some "out there" stuff.

Necroing a sort-of-tangent I started back in February here...

Just grabbed another Sam Phillips - Fan Dance (2001)

Less pretentious than Omnipop..., with sparser, stripped-down production. On first listen, I really like this. But her 1994 album Martinis And Bikinis is still better.

Bohren & der Club of Gore - Prowler - because I had to double down on the listless, leaden moods of a few songs I listed above. I love these guys; all their stuff's like this. Super-downtempo dark ambient jazz (see also "doom jazz", "noir jazz").

Pomplamoose, Ben Folds, & Nick Hornby - Things You Think - can't be too downbeat. I love when this comes up. Great narrative bits by Hornby. "Our universe consists of between 30 to 50 billion trillion stars arranged in 80 to 140 billion galaxies; our nearest neighboring star is called Proxima Centauri, and it's four light years away. We need some bread, but it's really hot outside and I can't be bothered to walk 'round the corner." Ben Folds is another fascinating musician.

Dire Straits - Sultans of Swing. Here's the catch, though. It's on a Korean instrument called a Gayageum and it would be impossible except for the sliding bridges for each string that allow Western tuning. Look closely in the vid and you'll see that she took at least three passes to lay down the entire track.

I've come to the realization that I've increasingly been listening to darker, more aggressive/dissonant music over the past few years. I find things like Meshuggah, Atheist, early Opeth and Mastodon, Intronaut, etc. piquing my interest more frequently of late. Chatotic experimental instrumental stuff too, like Freak Zoid. These are bands to which I would probably not have given a second listen before.

I'm left wondering whether there's a subtle connection to the darkening social/political mood lately, or if it is some sort of weird mid-life crisis (I'm in my mid-50s now, for those of you who are new here or haven't been following along). Just seems I've got an increasing preference for music that tends to have a darker or more chaotic mood.

I hear you jbi. We are a product of our environment, more often than not.

My environment has been 1990s-fueled lately. Chris Cornell's death has caused me to pull out some Audioslave and Soundgarden. Also listening to Soul Asylum, Nirvana, older Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and so on. These are the mythical musical heroes of my adolescent and early adult years.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

I've come to the realization that I've increasingly been listening to darker, more aggressive/dissonant music over the past few years. I find things like Meshuggah, Atheist, early Opeth and Mastodon, Intronaut, etc. piquing my interest more frequently of late. Chatotic experimental instrumental stuff too, like Freak Zoid. These are bands to which I would probably not have given a second listen before.

I'm left wondering whether there's a subtle connection to the darkening social/political mood lately, or if it is some sort of weird mid-life crisis (I'm in my mid-50s now, for those of you who are new here or haven't been following along). Just seems I've got an increasing preference for music that tends to have a darker or more chaotic mood.

(Hope we can keep this here in the BP, will split to R&P if needed.)

Just saw this and hear you friend, but I think its more rooted in mid life over thinking, I don't like the term crisis as it applies here lol and in no small part to what you are seeing and hearing around you.

Whereas I've been retreating from the '80s hair stuff and the '90s alt-country/Americana/"The Jayhawks are deities" tropes and have fallen back on original prog rock to take my mind off of external distractions. I can easily lose myself in The Lamb, TFTO, Thick as a Brick, Quadrophenia, or many others from that era. I've also heavily emotionally invested in The Tragically Hip and really hope that Gord's treatments are working.